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Friday, January 12, 2018

"Tech funders like CZI have led the way in backing personalized learning
lately, but other foundations are also on board. We take a deep dive
into what's happening in this fast evolving grantmaking space" says Caitlin Reilly, Staff Writer at Inside Philanthropy.

Photo: Monkey Business Images/shutterstock

A former senior program officer at the Gates Foundation has noticed
something changing when people talk about personalized learning.

“A
lot of the conversation would be about why. Why do you need
personalized learning? Why is it a good innovation and direction we
should be going in?” Helayne Jones said. “And now, you’re not hearing
the questions about why. You’re hearing the questions about how.”

“I
think most national funders working on K-12 are looking to make
personalized learning investments in a variety of ways,” Jones said.

Personalized
learning grabbed headlines last year with several big gifts from Mark
Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s philanthropic outfit. Jones now works as
a consultant to New Profit, a
nonprofit accelerator that received one of those big gifts, for $13
million, from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Gates Foundation.
In turn, these funds are being dispersed to groups working at the
forefront of personalized learning.

CZI escalated its
personalized learning work after bringing Jim Shelton on board. Shelton
is a former deputy secretary of education and previously worked for the
Gates Foundation.

CZI funded several personalized learning
projects in 2017. It helped fund Rhode Island’s move to bring
personalized learning to classrooms statewide. CZI made donations of
undisclosed amounts to Chiefs for Change, which works with a network of
districts across the country, and the College Board, as we reported. CZI
is also promoting a free personalized learning tool, the Summit
Learning Platform, a project that began at Facebook in partnership with Summit Learning, and is now a centerpiece of CZI's work in this space. While personalized learning’s rise is undeniable, defining it is
trickier. Generally speaking, the term refers to tailoring instruction
to students’ needs, but in practice, it can take a wide range of forms.

“Personalized
learning is not particularly well-defined. There’s no definition that’s
coalesced yet within the space,” said Elisabeth Stock, CEO of PowerMyLearning.
“And so everyone is doing different things that they are calling
personalized learning. There's no definitive answer,” Stock said.

The
national nonprofit partners with schools and districts in
under-resourced communities to help them implement personalized
learning. PowerMyLearning is among the groups that landed recent funding
from New Profit. It's also received grants in recent years from a wide
range of other funders, including the Carnegie Corporation, the Broad Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and a number of corporations.

A
classroom following PowerMyLearning’s model has multiple stations where
students engage in different modalities of learning. For example, Stock
said, for a lesson on probability, a teacher may lead a mini-lesson on
the topic in part of the classroom, while at another station, students
work together on an activity rolling dice. At a third station, students
do independent work while logged onto PowerMyLearning’s collaborative
platform.

In a PowerMyLearning classroom, there would also be
periodic homework assignments designed to engage families in their
children’s learning, but that is not necessarily a characteristic of
personalized learning.

The third station, the collaborative
platform, is the biggest reason we’ve been hearing so much about
personalized learning lately.

Personalized learning doesn’t
necessarily have to include technology. Tailoring instruction to student
needs is an idea that has been around for a while. The research to back
it up dates back to 1980, with work led by Benjamin Bloom, a professor
at the University of Chicago. The practice, arguably, goes back further
than that to Maria Montessori’s work in the early 1900s.

However, practitioners and funders say new technology has made it easier to put personalized learning into practice.

Beth Rabbitt, the CEO of Learning Accelerator, an organization that supports implementation of blended learning in schools, has observed this in her work.

“Personalized
learning for every student, every day is a really tough load for
teachers,” Rabbitt said.

“I think the places where technology has the
most potential as it relates to personalized learning is helping
teachers and students do what they’ve been trying to do, but haven’t
been able to actually do without new resources and tools.”

Jones
reported a similar sentiment: “Teachers would just say to me,
‘Personalized learning allows me to be the teacher I’ve always wanted to
be.”

“When you have 30 students in a classroom, you desire to be
able to know each student personally, and understand their learning
style, and really meet their needs. The reality is that that has been
very difficult to do at the individual level,” Jones said...

The field has especially caught the eye of Silicon Valley donors,
perhaps unsurprisingly, given the discipline’s new emphasis on
technology. As we've reported,
the Khan Academy—which offers "personalized learning resources for all
ages"—has attracted funding from a number of tech winners, including
John Doerr, Reed Hastings, Scott Cook, and the Gates Foundation. We've
also written about the CK-12 Foundation, co-founded by Neeru Kholsa, wife of billionaire Vinod Khosla,
and bankrolled by the couple's Amar Foundation. Its educational tech
tools are currently used by thousands of schools in the U.S. and a
growing number of international schools. In addition, personalized
learning has received attention from the Emerson Collective, the
philanthropic organization of Laurene Powell Jobs.Read more... Source: Inside Philanthropy

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Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.